| Dinner of Reconciliation |
Congressional Subcommittee Holds Hearing On John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park
Congressional Subcommittee Holds Hearing On John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park
Posted: Jan 24, 2012 12:31 PM CST Updated: Jan 24, 2012 2:03 PM CST
![John. W. Franklin with Congressman John Sullivan before the subcommittee meeting. [Sullivan's staff]](http://kotv.images.worldnow.com/images/16589777_BG1.jpg "John. W. Franklin with Congressman John Sullivan before the subcommittee meeting. [Sullivan's staff]")
John. W. Franklin with Congressman John Sullivan before the subcommittee meeting. [Sullivan's staff]KTUL: Sullivan Testifies on Behalf of Tulsa’s John Hope Franklin Memorial Park
Posted: Jan 24, 2012 10:52 AM CST Updated: Jan 24, 2012 10:54 AM CST
Washington, DC – Today, Congressman John Sullivan offered the following statement as the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands held a legislative hearing on the John Hope Franklin National Parks bill. Sullivan introduced this bill to take the first step in making the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park in Tulsa a unit of the national park system. Read the rest of this entry »
National Park Service gives conditional support to John Hope Franklin park study
BY JIM MYERS World Washington Bureau
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
WASHINGTON — The National Park Service expressed support Tuesday for Rep. John Sullivan’s bill to conduct a study on making the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park a unit of the park service.
Peter May, associate regional director of the park service, said, however, priority should be given to previously authorized studies. Read the rest of this entry »
Fear of bias is creating anxiety, speaker says
by: RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
Friday, November 18, 2011
The 600 people attending Thursday night’s John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Dinner may be eligible for college credit.
The after-dinner speaker, John A. Powell, did not engage in the usual corny jokes, peppy anecdotes and hyperbole. He is a college professor of some renown, and he sounds like one.
He also uses visuals.
Ohio State University professor John A. Powell addresses guests at the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Dinner at the Doubletree Hotel Downtown on Thursday evening. Powell's speech touched on the dynamics that affect race relations in today's society. MATT BARNARD/Tulsa World
“Exploring the Unconscious: The Dynamics of Race and Reconciliation” was the name of Powell’s presentation, and although it might not have been exactly entertaining, it was engrossing.
The upshot of it was that we all have our biases. The trick is recognizing, controlling and ultimately changing them.
“Because we have biases – racial biases, other biases – it doesn’t make us racist,” said Powell. “It makes us human.”
Currently on the faculty at Ohio State University but moving soon to Stanford, Powell explained that conscious thought involves only about 2 percent of the human brain’s activities, making the unconscious by far the more powerful.
He said research has shown that although the brain is processing about 11 million bits of information at any given time, only about 40 of those register in the conscious mind.
Biases are imbedded in the unconscious, usually by cultural and social influences.
Consciously, he said, most Americans do not want to be racist – and that, ironically, has led to greater unconscious racial anxiety.
“With an African-American president, we find that for the most part, conscious racial attitudes have improved,” said Powell, “but unconscious racial anxiety has actually gone up.
“We can measure it. We know Americans are much more anxious racially now than they were before (Barack) Obama was elected president.”
Powell said Americans “are not engaging” that anxiety, largely because of fear of what it might reveal about ourselves.
“None of us want to be racist,” he said. “We want to tear down racial barriers. And yet there is strong, robust, empirical proof that we have these racial biases and racial anxiety. And the fact that we have these anxieties is increasing the anxiety itself.”
Reducing that anxiety, Powell said, requires finding ways to consciously acknowledge it.
“We have to find a way to talk about it,” he said. “We have to find a space where it’s OK to have these anxieties. It doesn’t mean we’ll be past prejudice and bias, but it means we’ll be in a place where we can talk about it and do things … to move beyond it.”
Powell demonstrated the power of unconscious bias with a drawing of people in an ambiguous space.
Westerners, Powell said, usually interpret the picture as people in a room. Those from other cultures tend to see people sitting under a tree.
“Seeing, itself, is a cultural phenomenon,” he said. “How we interpret the world is a cultural phenomenon.
“There is no way of seeing the world just as it is. We all have biases, and these biases are given to us largely by culture.”
Randy Krehbiel 918-581-8365
randy.krehbiel@tulsaworld.com
Tulsa World honored for race riot coverage
by: Staff Reports
Sunday, October 30, 2011
The Tulsa World has been honored for an online archive of its coverage of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.
The World placed first in the Best Use of Multimedia category in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2011 Better Newspaper contest for papers with more than 50,000 circulation.
The World site, called “The Questions That Remain,” includes an interactive map, a timeline, videos, slideshows and an extensive archive of stories going back to June 1, 1921.
It also includes a discussion panel of Tulsa residents answering a series of questions concerning racism today.
Judges said: “This was far and away the best multimedia journalism that we saw. The staff did an excellent job of using appropriate media for different aspects of the project. They included all of the necessary storytelling and social media elements, created informative infographics and a valuable archive. They provided balanced and complete coverage in a user-friendly design. This is an excellent piece of multimedia journalism. We loved all of the elements that you included in your coverage – video, interactive map, photo gallery, timeline, archives and stories – but most of all we loved the questions that you posed in an attempt to prompt a discussion of racism in your area today. What a great idea.”
World staff members who created the project include reporter Randy Krehbiel, photographer Adam Wisneski, copy editor Russell LaCour, news researcher Hilary Pittman, web content coordinator Lauren Cavagnolo and Sunday Editor Debbie Jackson.
The Southern Newspaper Publishers Association is made up of 400 newspapers in 24 states.
This is the second time the World has won Best Use of Multimedia.
In 2008, The World won for “Lost Lives: A Decade of Tulsa Homicides.”
Associated Images:
Bystanders mill about as smoke from burning buildings rises in the aftermath of the Tulsa race riot. Courtesy of the Beryl Ford Collection
View the Tulsa World’s multimedia Tulsa Race Riot archive.
Copyright © 2011, World Publishing Co. All rights reserved
New Symphony Telling the Story of the Tulsa Race Riot
The Tulsa Race Riot, the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and the E.W. Marland story will figure prominently in a new symphony by University of Tulsa professor and composer Joseph Rivers, commissioned by the Signature Symphony at TCC in Tulsa for its November 5 concert. The symphony consists of four movements, each telling a story from Oklahoma history that highlights challenges faced by one of the various communities who came to our state and have contributed to it with their ingenuity and unique gifts.
The symphony, subtitled “Oklahoma Peoples in Trial and Triumph,” will be accompanied by narration and visual media and feature the Signature Chorale and Cherokee National Youth Choir. Included in the stories are the Tulsa Race Riot, the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the coming of the European American pioneers and oil men, culminating with E.W. Marland, oil man and one-time Oklahoma governor, and Lydie Marland, whose story and memory are preserved for posterity by the Marland Mansion of Ponca City. The symphony also celebrates through music and visual images many of the accomplishments that are occurring today in our state that signal hope for the future.
The performance will be take place on November 5, 2011 in the Van Trease Auditorium on the Tulsa Community College Southeast Campus, beginning at 8pm. Also on the program will be Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Randall Thompson’s Frostiana. For ticket and further information, visit the Signature Symphony website by clicking here. Or call 918/595-7777.
9/11 Observance Event Planned
The John Hope Franklin Center is a proud partner with the Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice for a 10th Anniversary Observance of 9/11.
Events include remarks by Former Mayor Susan Savage, a First Responder Street Expo and Concert.
John Stancavage: Partnerships needed to ensure north Tulsa’s recovery
Tulsa World
by: JOHN STANCAVAGE World Business Editor
Sunday, June 26, 2011
6/26/2011 3:45:04 AM
Editor’s note: This is the final installment of an eight-part series by Tulsa World Business Editor John Stancavage, who has been writing about his experiences as a member of the North Tulsa Development Council. The annual program operates under the umbrella of Leadership Tulsa. Class 3 will begin at the end of the summer.
Any plan to improve north Tulsa needs to have clear goals and be economically based, according to local executive Sam Combs.
Combs, the former president of Oklahoma Natural Gas Co. and now a member of Giant Partners, was the keynote speaker recently at the graduation of Class 2 of the North Tulsa Development Council.
About 25 people participated in the eight-month NTDC. I was one of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Oklahoma! Where the Black Towns Once Thrived
First stop on The Root‘s Black Bucket List of must-see places: Oklahoma, rich with bison, broncos and black history.
Greenwood Avenue, a wide residential street in Tulsa, Okla., has a bucolic calm to it these days. But stroll it slowly, past the handsome, ranch-style homes, toward downtown, and black history hangs heavy over the place.
And no wonder. It’s along this street in late May 1921 that a ragtag mob, bearing shotguns, pistols and other firearms, pushed its way, gunning down bystanders randomly, setting homes and stores aflame. Two days later, when the National Guard finally quelled the rampage, the street was in cinders, and by most accounts, more than 300 lay dead, most of them African American. Read the rest of this entry »
John Hope Franklin Center Offers Healing
By CHARLES CANTRELL
Associate Editor
THE CIRCLE OF LIFE: Student singers from the Deborah Brown Community School join hands to form a symbolic circle of life around the Tower of Reconciliation. The tower is the centerpiece of the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park. The students took part in the park dedication in October of 2010.
Courtesy Kavin Ross/John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation
“We need to do everything possible to emphasize the positive qualities that all of us have, qualities which we have never utilized to the fullest, but which we must utilize if we are to solve the problem of the color line in the twenty-first century.” – John Hope Franklin, The Color Line
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. It is also the second year that The John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation has held a national symposium focused on ways to transform years of racial division into a hopeful future of reconciliation and cooperation for Tulsa and the nation. The Symposium was aptly titled, “Tragedy to Triumph” reflecting the ongoing mission of the center to foster understanding among all factions of our diverse cultural landscape. Although the horrific violence that occurred in the Tulsa of 1921 served as contextual backdrop to the symposium, the intent of the gathering was as always how best to learn from the event and move forward as a community and a nation to summon our better angels in dealing with social, racial and cultural differences. Read the rest of this entry »
